.: Last blog of the season

At the Tongan feast

This blog update is coming to you from Tonga where we have spent the past four weeks.. We will be leaving tomorrow to return to Canada for a month long road trip out East and then up at Silver Star for the ski season. Bye bye palm tress, gin and tonics, cruising friends and the South Pacific.

Local dance troupe

Last week I posted from the Ham Radio and couldn’t add any photos, so there are a few more this week than normal. We met up with our friends (and rescuers from the Bora Bora reef mishap) Jan and Elle from Jenny. We went out with them for dinner and a local dance show at the Canadian-owned bar and restaurant “The Giggling Whale”.

Ellen and Jan from s/v Jenny

We’ve spent the last week out at the anchorages and enjoyed lots of hiking, beach combing and visits with other cruiser friends. The highlight was going to a charity Tonga feast put on by the Lape Island community – which consists of only seven homes, with extended families in each of them.

Di with one of the local cutie-pies

They had their wharf knocked out by the cyclone earlier this season, so they were raising funds to replace it. As mentioned last week, Canada Aid was matching 3 to 1, so they were very pleased to have raised about $1,000 at this event, which will mean $3,000 for them.

Wharf that got wiped out – that will be replaced

This was an authentic Tongan feast (as opposed to one put on for tourists) as all the families contributed food, lei’s, coconuts to drink from and the kids all danced for us. They had a Kava ceremony (which Peter loves) and a weaving demonstration. The pig was roasted by a Tongan turning it on a spit, as you can see.

Roasting the pig

The next morning we went to their church, along with other cruisers who stayed for their event. We donated a number of things to the school and took lots of photos which we put on disc for them. The school got its first computer last week, so the kids will delight in seeing photos of themselves.

Photo of the school teacher Daniel and his family after church

We enjoyed hooking up with Scott and Cindy from Beachhouse. We’ve had lots of good times together and we will miss them over the winter, but look forward to catching up with them next spring..

Peter & Cindy at the feast party

We went for our final dive of the season yesterday and it was awesome. I was a little nervous because with my last dive I had a few issues – but the good news is these last two dives went really well, so I regained my confidence. We did a number of swim through caves, saw lots of soft and hard coral and a huge moray eel hiding out in an underwater cave. We also had a treat of seeing a whale and calf on the trip back to the boat. We had to forego our planned whale-swimming trip on Sunday because of high winds and big seas, so this was a nice bonus.

Large banyan tree

As I’m typing this, Peter is busy securing the boat for our departure – fun things like changing the oil in the generator, pickling the water maker, and other necessary tasks. I’m not able to help him with much – but I was able to help packing up the sails on land. The part that my Captain wasn’t too happy about was when we brought them back on board, I accidently let the dinghy get a bit loose – and you guessed it – the dried and packed sail fell in to the water! I think everyone on mooring balls heard him swearing.

View of the anchorage from the top

It is with mixed emotions that we leave the wonderful "Friendly Islands" of Tonga. Our system of spending six months at sea and six months at Silver Star works out really well as we are always a little sad to say goodbye to QuickStar, but we are excited to be heading back to Canada. We are looking forward to getting back home to see our friends and family. We are quite excited about the pending arrival of our granddaughter in November. Also looking forward to having Kylie back home from Australia, even for just the month at Christmas, and meeting the love of her life. Ryan will be picking us up, so we get to spend some time with him. We'll be seeing Tara, Mark and Kieran in Ontario, along with Peter's parents and our friends back east.

Typical rural house on the sparsely inhabited outer islands

We fly out on Friday – spend a night and full next day in the capital city in Tonga– then fly to Fiji to L.A. and then in to Vancouver. We’ll spend about a week there – then up to Vernon to get our truck fixed and then heading out to Toronto for about a month-long road trip. We are looking forward to visiting with friends and family along the way.

Endless beaches

Thanks for following us on the blog this season as we explored French Polynesia, Niue and Tonga. We plan on coming back in April next year and heading to Australia. I’ll start updating the blog again then.

Peter & I heading out snorkeling on the reef